Home economists have often been portrayed as being obsessed with dust
and germs and intent on inventing endless busywork for women, but such
stereotypes hide the real contributions they made to health and well-being.
When the home economics movement came into being at the end of the 1800s,
infectious disease was the leading cause of death in the United States.
Tuberculosis, influenza, typhoid, pneumonia, and diphtheria were among
the many illnesses that threatened public health. Living conditions remained
poor for most people, and access to safe food, water, and sewage systems
was limited. This was true in rural areas, where poverty and isolation
were common, as well as in the rapidly growing cities, where industrialization
and large-scale immigration presented new challenges. Starting in the
1860s and 1870s, when Louis Pasteur formulated what became known as the
germ theory of disease, scientists gradually came to understand the causes
of infectious diseases, but until the development of antibiotics after
World War II, there were few treatments.

The
most effective approach was prevention, and it was here that home economists
made significant contributions to public health. They reached a wide audience
by working as health educators; teaching in schools, colleges, universities,
and extension services; and writing articles for the popular press. In
doing so, they contributed to public knowledge on a varietyof issues.
One of the most important of these was food preparation. Home economists
taught homemakers and institutional cooks about refrigeration, cooking
food to adequate temperatures, proper kitchen sanitation, and safe canning
techniques. Other concerns were advocating sanitary toilets and urging
construction of wells and septic systems, projects that helped prevent
diseases spread by feces, such as hookworm and typhoid. Home economists
also believed that dust and household dirt were major sources of health
problems such as tuberculosis, but this assumption was disproved by later
scientific research.

Hygiene was a major concern of the early home economists. Ellen Richards,
for example, taught sanitation at MIT. Starting around 1920, however,
home economists tended to move into other fields, such as nutrition and
textiles, that offered more career opportunities, while health issues
were dealt with more in the hard sciences and in the professions of nursing
and public health. Also, improvements in public sanitation (for example,
the wider availability of sewage systems and of food inspection) led to
a decline in infectious diseases and thus a decreasing need for the largely
household-based measures taught by home economists.

- Martin Heggestad, Mann Library

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